BarcelonaUntil 2019, the upward trend that Esquerra brought to town halls, Parliament and Congress had also had a positive impact on the number of Republican affiliates, reaching 9,844. It was that year, however, when this upward cycle was truncated and the party began to lose members year after year, according to the data that the party confirms to ARA. With these figures in hand, since 2019, Esquerra has lost 15% of militants to date. The current figure – yet to be finalized due to the process of revising the census for the congress on November 30 – is 8,335, according to the general secretary of the Republicans, Marta Rovira, in her appearance last week to make balance of his mandate.
ERC figures
The good results that the party began to chain since 2012, made them grow electorally and also in militancy. In the following seven years, up to 2019, they added 52% more affiliates. From just over 6,000 to standing at almost 10,000, practically touching the ceiling of Left militants since the recovery of democracy. The most intense years of the Process, between 2016 and 2018, added 800 militants each year, coinciding with a mobilized independence movement in the streets that culminated in the referendum on October 1, 2017 and the beginning of the repression .
However, it is precisely after the conviction of the leaders of the Process and when the party had already embraced the banner of negotiation with the State that the republicans begin to lose militancy. The most significant decline is between 2019 and 2020, when they lose 500 militants, but also between 2021 and 2022, when another 500 are deleted. And that the 2021 elections opened the doors of the Palau de la Generalitat to them for the first time since the Second Republic. While Esquerra is beginning to reap the benefits of negotiations with the State with pardons and later with the repeal of the crime of sedition, casualties are piling up in its offices.
In 2019, the Republicans also hit the ceiling in the municipal sphere, reaching 3,114 councilors; but also in Parliament, after they get 33 deputies in 2021. For the state elections of April 2019, Esquerra also reached a threshold it had not reached before: 15 deputies.
The 2008 congress
The historical record of militants was achieved in 2007: 10,167, already with the Statute approved in a referendum – the party ended up campaigning for no – and with the second tripartite party underway. A year later, in 2008, the Republicans still started the year above 10,000 militants, but closed it with 2,000 fewer. That year, ERC lived immersed in an internal battle that experienced its culminating moment in a congress to relieve Josep Lluís Carod-Rovira in the presidency. The candidacy of Joan Puigcercós was the winner of the four that faced it – in addition to his, that of Ernest Benach; that of Joan Carretero and that of Jaume Renyer–.
The war ended with the split of Reagrupament, with Carretero at the head, and then with Uriel Bertran, who had presented himself in tandem with Renyer, at the head of Solidaritat. Until 2012, Esquerra kept losing members until it reached 6,914. It lost 30% in five years, during which electoral defeats accumulated.
Now, the decline in militancy has started earlier. The situation in 2008 has been compared to the internal struggle that Esquerra is currently experiencing, but there are several voices that even consider that the current one is even bloodier, although they believe that there is now no risk of a split . However, no one rules out that there may be individual resignations after the congress depending on the candidacy that prevails. After November 30, it will be necessary to see if the decline in militancy continues or if the party manages to pull itself together internally and grow its militant base again.
